OnOn the afternoon of March 11th, 2011, Mitsuyoshi Hirai, the chief engineer of the cable maintenance ship Ocean Link, was sitting in his cabin 20 miles off Japan’s eastern coast, completing the paperwork that comes at the end of every repair. Two weeks earlier, something — you rarely knew what — damaged the 13,000-mile fiber optic cable connecting Kitaibaraki, Japan, and Point Arena, California. Alarms went off; calls were made; and the next day, Hirai was sailing out of the port in Yokohama to fix it.
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The repair was now nearly done. All that remained was to rebury the cable on the seafloor, which they were doing using a bulldozer-sized remotely operated submersible named Marcas — and, of course, the paperwork.
Suddenly, the ship began to shudder. Hirai got to his feet, found he could barely stand, and staggered out of his cabin, grasping the handrail as he pulled himself up the narrow stairway to the bridge. “Engine trouble?” Hirai asked the captain, who’d already checked and replied that everything seemed normal. The ship continued to tremble. Looking out from the bridge, the sea appeared to be boiling.
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They turned on the television. An emergency alert showed that an earthquake had struck 130 miles northeast of their location. The shaking finally stopped, and in the silence, Hirai’s mind leapt to what would come next: a tsunami.
Hirai feared these waves more than most people. He had grown up hearing the story of how one afternoon in 1923, his aunt felt the ground shake, swept up her two-year-old brother, and sprinted uphill to the cemetery, narrowly escaping floods and fires that killed over 100,000 people. That child became Hirai’s father, so he owed his existence to his aunt’s quick thinking. Now, he found himself in the same position. He knew tsunamis become dangerous when all the water displaced by the quake reaches shallow water and slows and grows taller. The Ocean Link, floating in less than 500 feet of water, was too shallow for comfort.
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In the family tree of professions, submarine cable work occupies a lonely branch somewhere between heavy construction and neurosurgery. It’s precision engineering on a shifting sea using heavy metal hooks and high-tension lines that, if they snap, can cut a person in half. In Hirai’s three decades with Kokusai Cable Ship Company (KCS), he had learned that every step must be followed, no matter how chaotic the situation. Above all else, he often said, “you must always be cool.”
Across Ocean Link’s 400-foot deck, the ship’s 50 crew members were emerging from their cabins and workstations, trying to figure out what had just occurred. Over the intercom, the captain announced that there had been an earthquake, a tsunami was coming, and the crew should ready the ship to evacuate to deeper water. The crew fanned out to check fuel tanks and lash down machinery. Inside a darkened, monitor-filled shipping container on the starboard deck, the submersible’s pilot steered Marcas back toward the ship as fast as the bulky robot’s propellers could carry it. Minutes later, the submersible was hoisted aboard and the Ocean Link was underway.
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The tsunami passed under them imperceptibly on their way out to sea, and when they came to a stop three hours later, the television was showing the first images of destruction. Members of the crew who weren’t working gathered on the bridge to watch the news, which continued to display a tsunami warning, a map of Japan with its eastern seaboard glowing red. They took turns trying to reach loved ones using the ship’s satellite phone, but no calls went through.
As night fell, periodic aftershocks thumped against the hull. Hirai thought about his wife, who was working at a department store in Yokohama near the Ocean Link’s port; his son, a junior in high school at the time; and his parents, whom the family lived with in his hometown of Yokosuka — none of whom he’d been able to reach. Everyone had someone they were worried about.
But Hirai also began to think about the work he knew lay ahead. The Ocean Link was one of a small number of ships that maintain the subsea cables that carry 99 percent of the world’s data. Positioned in strategic locations around the planet, these ships stand ready to sail out and fix faults the moment they are detected, and most of the time, they are more than equal to the task. But earthquakes, Hirai knew from experience, were different. They didn’t just break one cable — they broke many, and badly. If what he feared had happened, Japan risked being cut off from the world in its moment of need.
Sure enough, that night, a call came from headquarters confirming the Ocean Link was safe and directing them to remain at sea until further notice, followed by messages announcing cable failure after cable failure, including the one they had just finished repairing.
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Cable industry professionals tend to be pragmatic people, preoccupied with the material realities of working planet-scale construction. But in conversations about landing high-bandwidth cables in digitally neglected regions or putting millions of people back in contact with every fiber strand melted together, they often hint at a sense of larger purpose, an awareness that they are performing a function vital to a world that, if they do their jobs well, will continue to be unaware of their service.
For the Ocean Link crew, this awareness was bound up in a still unfolding national tragedy. They knew that whenever they returned to land, they would have to care for their loved ones quickly, because they would soon be going back out to sea. For how long, no one knew.
TheThe world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
A map of the world showing the dozens of fibre optic cable systems which stretch across the oceans, connecting continents and island chains. Some of these cables are extremely long. The map animates to show the cables laid down between 1989 and the present, with planned cables up to 2027 also displayed.
Active and planned fiber optic cable systems
Credit: TeleGeography
Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”
Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.
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The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists.
Hirai’s career path is characteristic in its circuitousness. Growing up in the 1960s in the industrial city of Yokosuka, just down the Miura Peninsula from the Ocean Link’s port in Yokohama, he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife. Six years later, his English proficiency got him called back to KDDI headquarters to help design Ocean Link for KCS, a KDDI subsidiary. Once it was built, he decided to go to sea with it, eventually becoming the ship’s chief engineer.
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Others come to the field from merchant navies, marine construction, cable engineering, geology, optics, or other tangentially related disciplines. When Fumihide Kobayashi, the submersible operator — a tall and solidly built man from the mountain region of Nagano — joined KCS at the age of 20, he thought he would be working on ship maintenance, not working aboard a maintenance ship. He had never been on a boat before, but Hirai enticed him to stay with stories of all the whales and other marine creatures he would see on the remote ocean.
Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon, enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times.
KCS has around 80 employees, many of whom, like Hirai, have worked there for decades. Because the industry is small and careers long, it can seem like everyone knows one another. People often refer to it as a family. Shipboard life lends itself to a strong sense of camaraderie, with periods of collaboration under pressure followed by long stretches — en route to a worksite or waiting for storms to pass — without much to do but hang out. Kobayashi learned to fish off the side of the ship and attempted to improve the repetitive cuisine by serving his crewmates sashimi. (His favorite is squid, but his colleagues would prefer he use the squid to catch mackerel.) Hirai, an enthusiastic athlete, figured out how to string up a net on the Ocean Link’s helideck and play tennis. Other times, he would join the crew for karaoke in the lounge, a wood-paneled room behind an anomalous stained-glass door containing massage chairs, a DVD library, and a bar. A self-described “walking jukebox,” Hirai favored Simon & Garfunkel and Billy Joel, though he said the younger members of the fleet didn’t go in for it as much.
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The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.
“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,” said Mike Constable, the former CEO of Huawei Marine Networks, who gave a presentation on the state of the maintenance fleet at an industry event in Singapore last year. “If you talk to the ship operators, they say it’s not sustainable anymore.”
He pointed to a case last year when four of Vietnam’s five subsea cables went down, slowing the internet to a crawl. The cables hadn’t fallen victim to some catastrophic event. It was just the usual entropy of fishing, shipping, and technical failure. But with nearby ships already busy on other repairs, the cables didn’t get fixed for six months. (One promptly broke again.)
But perhaps a greater threat to the industry’s long-term survival is that the people, like the ships, are getting old. In a profession learned almost entirely on the job, people take longer to train than ships to build.
KDDI Ocean Link
Drum engine A powerful but delicate 12-foot diameter electro-hydraulic steel drum used for paying out and recovering cables and grapnels during repairs.
“One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. He recalled another panel he was on in Singapore meant to introduce university students to the industry. “The audience was probably about 10 university kids and 60 old gray people from the industry just filling out their day,” he said. When he speaks with students looking to get into tech, he tries to convince them that subsea cables are also part — a foundational part — of the tech industry. “They all want to be data scientists and that sort of stuff,” he said. “But for me, I find this industry fascinating. You’re dealing with the most hostile environment on the planet, eight kilometers deep in the oceans, working with some pretty high technology, traveling all over the world. You’re on the forefront of geopolitics, and it’s critical for the whole way the world operates now.”
The lifestyle can be an obstacle. A career in subsea means enduring long stretches far from home, unpredictable schedules, and ironically, very poor internet.
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“Everyone complains about that,” said Kaida Takashi, a senior advisor at KCS, who is trying to get the Ocean Link set up with Starlink. It’s a generational difference, he said. For someone like him, a 62-year-old ham radio enthusiast, Wi-Fi barely fast enough to email is a luxury. Other industry veterans reminisced about the days when they felt fortunate to get faxes on board, or waiting for the mailbag in port, or the novelty of using the very cable they were laying to make calls from the middle of the ocean. But for people who grew up with an expectation of constant connectivity, the disconnection of shipboard life can cause visible discomfort. “It’s a part of them,” one industry veteran marveled of his younger colleagues. “They can’t let it go.”
The industry’s biggest recruiting challenge, however, is the industry’s invisibility. It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”
TheThe Ocean Link spent two nights at sea before receiving orders to return. As they neared land, Hirai saw debris from the tsunami’s backwash floating in the water: fishing nets, tires, the roofs of buildings, the bloated body of what he guessed was a cow.
The earthquake measured 9.1 on the Richter scale, the fourth largest ever recorded and the largest to ever hit Japan. But it was the series of tsunami waves that arrived half an hour later that dealt the most destruction, surging miles inland and sweeping buildings, cars, and thousands of people out to sea. The death toll would eventually climb to nearly 20,000, and the day would become a national tragedy referred to simply as “3/11.”
The full extent of the devastation was still becoming clear when the Ocean Link returned, but the disaster had already entered a new phase. One hundred and sixty miles north of Tokyo, a 50-foot tsunami wave overtopped a seawall protecting the Fukushima power plant, swamping the emergency generators that were cooling the reactors through its automatic post-quake shutdown and precipitating a nuclear meltdown.
Hirai’s wife and son had made it back home to their house in Yokosuka, where they lived with Hirai’s parents. Kobayashi’s family, too, was safe. Some crew lost loved ones; others sent family to stay with relatives in the south out of fear of radiation. They all knew that they had only a few days before they would be sent back out to sea.
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The Ocean Link in a storm in the North Pacific. The ship pitches wildly in the heavy swell, the waves crashing over its bow.
The disaster had severed phone lines and wrecked cell towers, causing phone service to cut out almost immediately after the earthquake struck. Instead, people turned to email, Skype, and other online services that were mostly able to route around damage to the network. There was a sense, according to one engineer’s postmortem presentation, that the internet was the only media that survived.
But its survival was more tenuous than the public knew. While the cables connecting Japan to the rest of the world survived the initial destruction, later that night, as millions of people tried to find their way home with trains stopped and power intermittent, engineers in Tokyo network operation centers watched as one cable after another failed. By the next morning, seven of Japan’s 12 transpacific cables were severed. Engineers working through the night and following days managed to shift traffic to those that remained, but the new routes were near their maximum capacity. The head of telecom company NTT’s operation center at the time estimated that if another cable failed, it would have lost all traffic to the US. With servers for most major internet companies located there, Japan would have effectively lost the internet.
Normally, the sequence of repairs would be determined by whichever cable owner reported the fault first, but given the extraordinary circumstances, the usually self-interested cable owners agreed to defer to KCS. The priority was to repair a cable — any cable — as fast as possible.
It was impossible to know the state of the cables on the ocean floor, so like forensic investigators, Hirai and the other engineers had to work with the sparse facts available. By having the cable landing stations on either side of the ocean beam light down their end of the line and time the reflections back, they were able to locate the faults nearest to them within a few meters. Most of the faults lay in deep water, in the canyons channeling into the Japan Trench. This, plus the timing of the faults, indicated it wasn’t the quake that broke them but the underwater avalanches it triggered.
“It hasn’t changed in 150 years... The Victorians did it that way and we’re doing it the same way.”
Submarine landslides are awesome events whose existence was only discovered in the 1950s, when scientists analyzed the timing of 12 cable faults that severed communication between Europe and North America two decades earlier. Before then, according to oceanographer Mike Clare, “It was assumed that deep water was boring and nothing happens down there.” In fact, the ocean floor is riven with mountains and canyons that experience avalanches that dwarf anything found on land, cascades of sediment and debris racing for hundreds of miles. Hirai had dealt with them in Taiwan in 2006, one of the most notorious events in the annals of cable repair.
On December 26th, an earthquake dislodged sediment on Taiwan’s southern coast and sent it rushing 160 miles into the Luzon Strait, one of several global cable chokepoints. Nine cables were severed and Taiwan was knocked almost entirely offline. Banking, airlines, and communications were disrupted throughout the region. Trading of the Korean won was halted. The cables, buried under mountains of debris, were nearly impossible to find. It took 11 ships, including the Ocean Link, nearly two months to finish repairs.
Often in a multi-cable disaster like the Taiwan earthquake, every ship in the region comes to assist. But with Japan, there was an unprecedented complication: the majority of the faults were located offshore of the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Ship operators deemed assistance too risky, which meant that, for the time being, the Ocean Link was on its own.
The crew felt not only duty bound to work but uniquely capable of doing so. They had dealt with radiation before, though not at this scale. In 1993, shortly before the Ocean Link was to lay a cable linking Japan, Korea, and Russia, they learned the Soviets had dumped radioactive waste in the ocean along the planned route. With some trepidation, KCS proceeded with the job. They bought Geiger counters and protective gear, flew in nurses from the US with chemical weapons training, and scanned the water for radiation as they went. When none was detected, they put the gear in storage.
Now, as they readied the ship for departure, an employee was dispatched to the depot to find the old radiation gear. A local university donated a few more sensors and trained the crew on how to use them.
They decided to begin with the same cable they had just finished repairing when the earthquake struck. On a drizzling afternoon eight days after returning to port, with smoke still rising from the Fukushima power plant, the Ocean Link set back out to sea.
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ToTo the extent he is remembered, Cyrus Field is known to history as the person responsible for running a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, but he also conducted what at the time was considered an equally great technical feat: the first deep-sea cable repair.
Field, a 35-year-old self-made paper tycoon, had no experience in telegraphy — which helps explain why, in 1854, he embarked on such a quixotic mission. Though small bodies of water like the English Channel had been bridged by telegraph, failure was routine and costly. Cables shorted out, snapped under tension, snagged on rocks, were sliced by anchors, twisted by currents, tangled around whales, attacked by swordfish, and devoured by a “miserable little mollusc” called the Teredo worm with an appetite for jute insulation.
Field fared no better. Twelve years after he began, he had endured severed cables, near sinkings, and had one “success”: a cable laid in 1858 that prompted celebrations so enthusiastic that revelers set fire to New York City Hall. The cable failed weeks later.
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Field tried again seven years later only for the cable to snap halfway across the Atlantic. The next year, he set out yet again, promising not only to finally lay a working transatlantic cable but to recover the broken cable and finish that one, too.
By that time, a crude method had been developed for fixing cables in shallow water. A ship would drag a hooked grapnel anchor across the seafloor, until, like the tremor of a fishing line, increasing tension showed they’d caught the cable, which they would then haul on board to fix. Field’s plan was basically this but bigger: bigger hooks, stronger rope, more powerful winding engine, all aboard the largest ship afloat, a passenger liner called the SS Great Eastern that had been retrofitted for the mission. William Thomson, the project’s scientific adviser and the future Lord Kelvin, did the math and deemed it feasible.
“When it was first proposed to drag the bottom of the Atlantic for a cable lost in waters two and a half miles deep, the project was so daring that it seemed to be almost a war of the Titans upon the gods,” wrote Cyrus’ brother Henry. “Yet never was anything undertaken less in the spirit of reckless desperation. The cable was recovered as a city is taken by siege — by slow approaches, and the sure and inevitable result of mathematical calculation.”
Humans continue to be by far the single greatest threat to cables
Field’s crew caught the cable on the first try and nearly had it aboard when the rope snapped and slipped back into the sea. After 28 more failed attempts, they caught it again. When they brought it aboard and found it still worked, the crew fired rockets in celebration. Field withdrew to his cabin, locked the door, and wept.
Cable repair today works more or less the same as in Field’s day. There have been some refinements: ships now hold steady using automated dynamic positioning systems rather than churning paddle wheels in opposite directions, and Field’s pronged anchor has spawned a medieval-looking arsenal of grapnels — long chains called “rennies,” diamond-shaped “flat fish,” spring-loaded six-blade “son of sammys,” three-ton detrenchers with seven-foot blades for digging through marine muck — but at its core, cable repair is still a matter of a ship dragging a big hook along the ocean floor. Newfangled technologies like remotely operated submersibles can be useful in shallow water, but beyond 8,000 feet or so, conditions are so punishing that simple is best.
00 ft
Euphotic (Sunlight) zone
656 ft
Dysphotic (Twilight) zone
3,280 ft
Bathypelagic (Midnight) zone
13,123 ft
Abyssopelagic (abyssal) zone
19,685 ft
Hadopelagic (hadal) zone